Except where stated in the post, photos posted on or after January 1st, 2014 are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Basically, do what you like with those images but always credit Donncha Ó Caoimh as the author and link here. You'll also have to license the photo under the same license.

Cork, Ireland and Elsewhere

The 300 Effect

300 hasn’t made it to Ireland yet but I started seeing blogs talking about it yesterday. Most are reviewing it but Photocritic looked at recreating the same style of photography that appears in the film with the help of graphic artist Jason Niedle.

Last week’s Time magazine has a two page spread on the movie. It was interesting to read that because of the high tech CGI used in the film, the only “real” things in the movie were the actors and little else. They had to use their initiative too as the film was almost completely shot inside a studio against a blue screen. I’m looking forward to seeing it!

The trivia page is full of interesting, err, trivia. Yay, they used Linux too!

Ten visual effects vendors contributed to the film, spread over three continents.

The filmmakers used bluescreen 90% of the time, and greenscreen for 10%. They chose blue because it better matched the lighting paradigm (green would have been too bright) and because red garments (a la spartan capes) look better when shot over blue.

There was one day of location shooting, which was for the horses that were shot for the ‘approaching sparta’ scene.

Two very different reviews of the movie: The Star offers a serious look at brutal Spartan society while Kevin Costello says, “I’m not nearly as straight as I often claim” after watching all the bare male skin and asking, “Is there any man in this film with less than a washboard stomach?”